Christine O'Donnell

If there’s a doubt in anyone’s mind that Fox News will cheerlead almost any Republican, no matter how foolish or inconsequential, check out tonight's Hannity segment that trumpeted Christine "I'm not a witch" O’Donnell’s endorsement for the 2012 Republican primary. The thought crossed my mind that the whole thing was a sneaky way of making Romney look bad. But even if Hannity’s praise of O'Donnell didn't seem quite sincere, he sure did a good job of looking like his good wishes for her and Romney were.

Bill O'Reilly interviewed Christine O'Donnell Thursday night (8/25/11). It was a completely softball interview in which O'Reilly made no mention of O'Donnell walking out of a recent CNN interview - though he did play her "I'm not a witch" ad over her objections. But immediately following the interview, he lined up two commenters to "analyze" it and those two - Dagan McDowell and Margaret Hoover - were full of criticisms of O'Donnell. It's a common tactic on Fox. Sean Hannity used it after his interview with Austan Goolsbee the same night. It's a way to spin the interview so that the guest gets skewered without the host's hands getting dirty, so to speak. For extra hypocrisy, O'Reilly and his guests attacked the "liberal media" for going after O'Donnell.

Christine "I'm not a witch" O'Donnell, the failed Tea Party senate candidate of 2010, has not melted or flown away. She has a new book out and, not surprisingly, she made a visit to the Hannity show as part of her Republican Rehab tour. Judging from the lapdog interview tonight, she's still got Sean Hannity in her back pocket.

Yesterday (11/26/10), Carl Cameron reported on what was introduced as "fine tuning" going on in the Tea Party in reaction to some of the 2010 electoral losses - think Christine O'Donnell, Sharron Angle and Joe Miller. Cameron painted the losses as due to a lack of proper vetting saying, for example, that Tea Partiers backed O'Donnell "unaware of her personal financial history" (no word on whether they knew she had dabbled in witchcraft). Now, according to Cameron, there's an effort underway to "recruit and train articulate conservatives with sound positions." But Cameron somehow never mentioned the role of his Fox News colleague, Sarah Palin, in the election, despite the fact that her endorsements of those candidates have been blamed for Democrats retaining control of the Senate.

Christine O'Donnell is not getting much support from the Republican Party. According to Howard Fineman, she has struck back by publicly complaining in an effort to motivate Tea Partyers to rally to her side - with cash, of course. Fineman reports that "two top GOP insiders" told him that O'Donnell "said at a strategy meeting with DC types last week: 'I've got Sean Hannity in my back pocket, and I can go on his show and raise money by attacking you guys.'"